American Elsewhere (84 page)

Mona shakes her head. “God. God, damn it all.”

She has wanted this so much. For so long, this was all she wanted. And now she has it, with what amounts to the waving of a magic wand…

She wonders what she would be giving up were she to raise the child as her own. Would this be, in some distorted way, as if she were buying something? So many people in Wink did the same—they got to live their dream just by giving up one little thing, like an exchange. Mona looks at Gracie, and wonders if she ever saw a creature so violated and so abused in her life, a child whose parents traded away her health and sanity and dignity so they could live in peace and quiet…

The child’s tiny fingers probe the collar of Mona’s shirt with incredibly delicate movements as she drifts back to sleep.

How broken she felt when she lost her daughter. Is it possible that somewhere, in one of the strange sisters of her own time, the same thing is happening again? A grieving mother, wondering where her child is, and left feeling incomplete, as if suffering a monstrous amputation?

But she’s mine
, thinks Mona.
I love her. I would be good to her. I would be so good, maybe even better because I lost her once before…

It feels as if something is gripping her intestines, twisting and twirling them into one big knot.

“I don’t want to lose you again,” she whispers to the little girl. The child takes a deep breath in, and sighs it out. Tiny lungs, functioning perfectly. Her lips mime suckling. “But it wouldn’t be right, would it. You… you have a momma. They took you from her. And if I keep you I’d be part of that, and I can’t do that to her. I can’t do to her what happened to me. And I would know. I would know I’d done it. It would be inside me every day, every time I looked at you, and it would poison me. It’d poison me and it’d poison you and it would all just wind up wrong. I just… I mean,
damn
it, sweetheart. I just wanted to give you all the love I never got. Just a chance to put things right. I was gonna spoil you rotten, girl. I was gonna work my fingers to the bone for you. But that’s different from… from just
having
you. Having you is different from loving you. And I love you. I do. So I don’t think I can keep you, honey. I just don’t think I can. I want to. More than anything in the world, I want to. But I love you, so I
can’t
.”

She imagines desperate protestations—
No, Momma, don’t send me away again
… “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You won’t ever know how sorry I am. You won’t… hell, you won’t even
know
me, you’ll never even know that this happened. But you can’t do that to someone. You can’t make them something they’re not. Because then they’re just… window dressing. Just a face in a picture. And you mean so much more to me. So, so, so much more to me.” She kisses the child on the cheek. “But I want you to know that I love you. Someone out there loves you. I don’t know what life will hold for you, if it’ll be a good one or a bad one. But you are loved. Loved beyond words. Loved here, and… and I’m sure the momma over there loves you, too. I’m sure she does. I do, so she must. She must. How could she not?” Then, more quietly: “How could she not.”

Mona bows her head to touch her brow to her child’s. She listens to the tiny breaths for a moment. “Now come on.” She sniffs, and stands, though her legs wobble. “Let’s go home and see her.”

The lens is blank. Again, when Mona nears it she can feel it is like a door still slightly ajar.

“Are you quite sure about this?” asks Parson.

“Do it,” says Mona. Her daughter bows her back, tired of being held for so long. “Just do it.”

“We’ll need your help,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “You will need to give a
push
. But I think I’ve given you enough training on this, yes?”

Mona nods. The two of them start to hum, or the things inside them do. Mona faces the mirror. Her eyes search its depths. It suddenly does not seem flat, but concave, like she’s staring into half of a bubble, or maybe a tunnel…

Mona feels something give way in the mirror. And an image begins to solidify in the glass.

A yellow nursery, with polka-dotted curtains.

How she wanted that life in the mirror. How she dreamed of it.

“You can cross, if you want,” says Parson. “This is, after all, your own time, just slightly different.”

Mona looks at him, and he nods toward the silvery image. She takes a breath, and walks toward it.

She expects to feel something, as if she’s jumped into a lake or parted a veil, but there is nothing. It’s as if there’s just a hole in the world, and this pleasant nursery lies on the other side.

There is the fragrance of laundry sheets and diapers and Lysol and fresh bedding. Everything is neat and tidy; all the tiny little clothes have been properly put away; and unless she’s mistaken, there are lines in the carpet from a recent, vigorous vacuuming. Something inside her swells to see all this.

Mona wishes she knew what time it is over here; she thinks it’s just minutes after the child was originally stolen, but she isn’t sure.

She walks to the crib. The baby begins squirming, already anticipating being forced to sleep.

Do it now, or you’ll never bring yourself to do it again.

She lays her child in the crib and kisses her on the head. “Thank you for showing me that I would have been a good momma,” she whispers. “Your own momma might be kind of scared for a while. But don’t worry. She’ll get over it. It might take her a while, but… but I know she always gets over it.”

Mona begins to back away.

She knows this is the right decision, so why is she crying so much? Why does it hurt so much to accept how things are?

The child sits up and squawks a tiny protest.

Mona begins to walk back through the mirror. As she does, she hears a voice in the hall—
her
voice—say, “
Wendy?
Wendy, is that you?”

And she thinks:
Wendy. Her name is Wendy. What a good name.

Through the chamber, through the door, down the dusky hall. She parts the dying memories with the blade of her hand, sends echoes scuttering over dusty stone. The spying eye of the past clapped to cracks in the air, watching, listening, snickering.

What more is there to this dark earth than halls and halls of empty rooms?

Up the ladder (her hands shake on each rung), up up and up, until the screaming red supernova erupts over her, sunlight howling and blistering and blank, pouring down the shaft to swallow her and fill her ears with silence, blissful silence.

The stone so hot her hands should sizzle. A sky shorn of clouds, all moisture scraped away. This land is so empty. And in the distance, the ribbon of black smoke, and the streak of gray where a town once stood.

I have lost her again.

She walks to the edge of the mesa. Gracie sits below, staring into the valley. She asks a question, but Mona cannot hear—she walks down and sits beside her and looks out.

In the shade the stone is cool. The air is redolent with pine sap. The wind blows southward, so each breath is free of smoke. Below her, among the trees, there is the flit of birds’ wings, and the buzzing, aimless twirl of grasshoppers.

Gracie says something. Her words have a dull ring on the shelf of stone.

“What?” Mona whispers.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Mona sits there, frozen, broken, empty.

Gracie says, “I think you did the right thing.”

She holds a hand out to Mona. Mona bows her head, reaches out, and takes it and squeezes and holds on as hard as she can, just as hard as she possibly can.

They sit in silence for what feels like lifetimes. After a while Mona realizes Mrs. Benjamin and Parson are watching them from down the path. She feels a wave of irrational rage, for
they
did this to her, they or their kind, but she swallows it to ask, “What do you want?”

“To ask something of you,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“What the hell do you mean?”

“We have discussed it in detail,” says Parson, “and we have decided that, though there are many things to endear us to this way of life”—he exchanges a glance with Mrs. Benjamin, who nods—“it would be best for us to go home.”

“Home? You mean to—”

“To the other side, yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“You can do that?”

“There is no one now to say that we cannot,” says Parson. “And with the lens, we have concluded it is perfectly possible. It should be just a short step away. I do not know what state it’s in—Mother’s machinations likely left our home quite in ruins. But that does not mean it cannot be rebuilt. With Her gone, perhaps there is some hope.”

“What about the rest of you?”

“I believe most of them perished in the fire,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “They, or their vessels, or their physical forms. They are no longer bound to this world. They are, most likely, on the other side already,
in some fashion or another. Lost, drifting, helpless… it would simply be a matter of reuniting them, and giving them a little leadership.”

“Then you could do all this again,” says Gracie. “You could come back, and try all over again…”

“No,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “For one, Mother is no longer with us, so I doubt if we would have any motivation to return. And for another, we will not have the lens.”

“Why not?” asks Mona.

“Because we want you to close it after us,” says Parson.

“Close it, and
lock
it,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Why?” asks Mona.

“What was done here was foolish, and vain, and proud,” says Parson. “I wish to forget it ever happened.”

“Or, failing that, at least to learn from it,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

Mona turns away.

“Will you help us with this?” Parson asks. “Will you help us close the door?”

“We have asked much of you, we know,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But there must be someone behind to close it. Just one more thing, Miss Bright. Just this one thing.”

Mona looks at Gracie. She sighs—for there is no place she’d more prefer to avoid than the innards of Coburn—but says, “Wait here for me. This should only take a little while.”

They wend their way back, through the empty, whispering hallways. But the halls do not feel quite as frightening to Mona as they did before. Now they are hollow, broken. She asks, “Will this be dangerous for you?”

“Oh, yes,” says Parson. “I expect so. Our world is in quite a bit of turmoil. Mother meant it to frighten us into leaving. Her threats were rarely hollow.”

“Then why would you choose to leave?”

“You’d want us here? The people who did all this to you?”

“Well… they’re all gone. And that wasn’t
you
, really.”

Parson thinks on it. “You talked to Mother, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“When you were struck with lightning. I know her devices. She spoke to you, didn’t she?”

“Yeah. She did.”

“And did she offer you something?”

“How did you know that?”

“Mother
always
offers something, Miss Bright,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

“Well, yeah. She did,” says Mona.

“And you turned it down,” says Parson.

“Yes.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know. What she offered me just wouldn’t feel… honest. It would have been as made up as the rest of the things in Wink.”

He nods. “That was a very wise choice, then. We make the same choice now—we have the option of living there as we are, as we
really
are, with all its misfortunes and difficulties, or living here as we are
not
—without pain, without hardship, and without value.” They arrive at the lens chamber again, which has lost none of its unearthly quality. “What lies on the other side of the lens may be dangerous. But I would rather have it than the alternative.” He looks back to Mrs. Benjamin, extends a hand, and helps her over the threshold to the chamber.

“You know, Miss Bright,” says Mrs. Benjamin, “you could come with us.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, you are one of us, to a certain extent. Where we are going is, I guess you could say, our ancestral home. I do not know if you have ever felt at home in this place… but perhaps you may have better luck with us. Though it would leave the door open, since there would be no one to close it.” Parson gives Mrs. Benjamin a disapproving look. “I only wish to give her the option,” she says mildly.

Mona thinks about it. She stares into the mirror, and wonders what she would see if she accepted. But she shakes her head.

“I am happy to hear that,” says Parson. “I believe your chances are better here.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I find it difficult to say. I suppose I think you to be a caring person, Miss Bright. You are not Mother—you have much to give others. I cannot tell you what to do, but I suggest you leave this place, find someone to care for, and live as honestly as the world allows.”

A hum fills the lens chamber once more. Their eyes shudder like candle flames. “Remember,” says Mrs. Benjamin, “you must shut it behind us.”

“But I don’t know how,” says Mona.

“It is simple,” says Parson. “A mirror that looks in on itself is not a mirror at all.”

The surface of the lens ripples. Mona sees red stars, and many peaks, and a far, strange country of leaning gray towers…

“Goodbye, Miss Bright,” says Parson.

“Goodbye, dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin.

Two childlike figures stand in the center of the chamber, watching her with old eyes and youthful smiles.

They blink out, once, twice, three times—and are gone.

Mona stands still and reaches out to the lens, feeling its boundaries as she did mere minutes ago.
It could go to so many places, so many times, if I wanted it to.
But she remembers what Parson said, and bends it, pushes it, slowly and carefully, until the only thing the lens opens on is this chamber, and the lens itself, until…

There is a sound like freezing ice. Mona looks and sees the lens no longer reflects anything: it is solid, like a plate of lead.

She reaches out and touches it. It is slightly warm, but solid. “Gone,” she says.